“The FBI’s attempt to spy on the Trump campaign was much broader than publicly disclosed, as agents directed an undercover informant to make secret recordings, pressed for information on various GOP individuals, and tried to locate “anyone in the Trump campaign” with links to Russia who could collect dirt that was “damaging to Hillary Clinton.
The FBI confidential human source Stefan Halper’s now-declassified operational handling files, codenamed “Mitch,” offer an extraordinary insight both into the office’s strategies to test the Trump campaign and the large dragnet that was cast to threaten various high-level officials inside the GOP campaign just weeks before Americans voted their next president in November 2016.
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Among the revelations, the memos make clear that:
On July 31, 2016, almost immediately after the FBI initiated a Russia collusion investigation focused narrowly on the foreign lobbying of a single Trump campaign assistant named George Papadopoulos, agents pressed Halper for details on more than half a dozen other figures, including future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, foreign policy advisor Sam Clovis, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, economic adviser Peter Sessions.
Halper presented extensive exculpatory information to the FBI that was never revealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorized a year of surveillance targeting the Trump campaign, and specifically Page, including transcripts of conversations he collected of targeted Trump advisers making claims of innocence.
Although the office did not participate in surveillance on the Trump campaign, current FBI director Chris Wray has insisted that Halper’s duties include many of the commercial spying techniques, including the production of a false cover story (he wanted a position in the Trump campaign), hidden recordings, providing background on targets, suggested questions to ask, and even contact information for possible targets.
But the most explosive findings of the memos are the sheer scope of the insufficiently expected dragnet of the FBI targeting the Trump campaign, and the clearly defined goal of the agents to thwart any campaign attempt by Trump to get dirt from Russia that could damage his Democratic rival.
The Crossfire Hurricane investigation team is trying to decide whether someone in the Trump campaign is in a position to collect information from the Russian Federation either directly or indirectly about the anonymous release of information that would damage Hillary Clinton during the campaign,” one of the early FBI electronic communications (ECs) from Halper’s undercover work.”
